Validating if Strings follow datetime object syntax.

[AaronShah2]

I was using this class to validate datetime objects in various queries. However, due to various circumstances, the datetime objects inside these queries were stored as strings. I created this method below to solve this issue:

from datetime import datetime
from django.utils.dateparse import parse_datetime

def convert_to_datetime(data: Any) -> Any:
    """Recursive Helper function that converts datetime objects to
    proper type

    Returns:
        Object: data dictionary that has had its datetime values
        converted
    """
    if isinstance(data, dict):
        for k, v in data.items():
            data[k] = convert_to_datetime(v)
    elif isinstance(data, list):
        for i,e in enumerate(data):
            data[i] = convert_to_datetime(e)
    elif isinstance(data, str):
        try:
            dateObj = parse_datetime(data)
            if dateObj is None:
                return data
            else:
                return dateObj
        except ValueError:
            pass
    return data

struct = {
            "startDate": type(datetime(2018, 1, 22, 3, 20, 6)),
            "endDate": type(datetime(2020, 4, 20, 2, 4, 8))
}

data = {
            "startDate": '2016-04-20T01:07:16Z',
            "endDate": '2020-11-12T04:20:04Z'
}
convertedData = convert_to_datetime(data)
Schema(struct).validate(convertedData) 

I would be happy to contribute this code to the repository if a fix for this issue does not exist.